Author Description

As a young man, Antoni Tapies set out to study law; less than two years later, he had declared himself a painter. Born in 1923, he dabbled in Surrealism under the influence of Paul Klee and Joan Miro but soon become an Abstract Expressionist, first in the context of Arte Povera and then as an early--defining--practitioner of mixed media, stirring clay and marble dust into his work and adding cloth, string and paper. He became one of Spain's greatest artists, and one of his generation's greatest, winner of the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion and the subject of Guggenheim and Jeu de Paume retrospectives. This eighth volume of his catalogue raisonne assembles his most recent work, from 1998 to 2004. In recent years he has consolidated and condensed an artistic language that expresses in visual terms, first, his conception of art, and, second, intimate philosophical concerns to which he has returned with the passage of time. His forms, despite their ductility, remain faithful to their origins: these works are at once of the moment, of the contemporary world, and a record, an analysis, of his career.